this is a fun argument but child labor =/= adults being able to decide how much they want to pay and how much they want to work for.
It's almost like most minimum wage laws account for different types of businesses. https://www.ny.gov/new-york-states-minimum-wage/new-york-states-minimum-wage Not to mention that in your theory, the small business owner's revenue stays the exact same. The reality is that now more people have more disposable income and can therefore buy more ice cream. So yes, you're paying your workers more, but you're selling more ice cream. If you're selling 10 more ice cream cones in an hour at $3 in profit while paying your employee $7 more dollars per hour, as an owner you have are actually netting $23/hour after the minimum wage increase.
Skimmed. It's the same tired pearl clutching arguments about why Antifa is bad, how they play into right wing propaganda efforts, etc. And frankly you've repeated your arguments so many times that I'm not interested in having a discussion about them. I find them to be impotent and utterly complicit in letting Nazis feel safe to roam the streets and fuck shit up. They shouldn't feel safe, and driving them back underground is nothing more than an act of community self defense.
It's almost like we as a society discuss issues and decide the proper way to handle them and that's the function of the government. We didn't agree that 12 year olds shouldn't be working in mines until the turn of the century due to the exact mentality you are approaching with your minimum wage argument.
Cool. Don't read it then. I just posted an article by a very well respected magazine that is making all the arguments I've made over and over again. I'm hoping that will hold more weight than some rando message board poster.
Only it's not the exact same. It's the difference between adults making choices and children. I now you are trying to make it the same, but it's not. We can agree that children should not be forced or allowed to work, and disagree on minimum wage laws.
I did read a bit more into it after the initial skim. I haven't changed my initial appraisal of the article. And this is a magazine that regularly pisses on flyover country and the working man, not to mention any legitimate, non-violent socialist political efforts. You can venerate it all you want, I'll wipe my ass with it all the same.
Do you think when you turn 18 you magically aren't in a shitty situation that makes you easily exploitable? The reason illegal immigrants will do work for $5/hour is because they might as well be refugees. If you want our entire country to be in such dire straits as illegal immigrants that they will take $5/hour then I don't know what to tell you.
You don't respect the Atlantic? Damn that's a first. They're a pretty legitimate magazine. Punching people is not smashing a movement with the utmost brutality. It's literally murdering everyone that believes in those things. That statement also came from a man who got put in jail for like 3 years after trying to overthrow the government. Smashing that movement didn't require "utmost brutality." It just required a single person being hanged for treason.
and if you are not selling 10 more ice cream cones? and if it's not one high school girl making an additional $7/hr, but 3? And of course you need to hire another 1 or maybe 2 to keep up with the increased demand. Do the people who would be effected by raising the minimum wage spend all of that additional money on things like ice cream? if so, why is $15 the magic number? if giving people more money means they spend that money, and the economy benefits, what is the limit of that benefit. Also, in a medium business, you have levels of income. For simplification, say a company has a min wage employee ($8), a middle wage employee ($18), and a high wage manager ($35). if you raise the min wage employee from $8 to $15/hr, you are basically paying that min wage worker the same as a middle wage worker. You will either A) give the middle wage and possible the high wage worker a raise, or B) tell the min wage worker to fuck off and hire another more skilled middle wage worker. Doesn't it make sense that employers will hire workers according to the value of their production, and if they out-earn their value to the company, they cost the company money and will be replaced by higher value employees?
I think it depends on what you bring to the table. An uneducated 18 year old with no skills and a bad attitude is in a shitty situation. I don't think the solution is to demand that 18 year old is pair $15/hour. The reason illegal immigrants will do work for $5/hour is that there is a market for someone of their skill level. If someone could double their productivity for an extra $3/hour, they would get hired and illegal immigrants woudl be out of a job.
In the first situation, you're netting $9/hour if you're paying 3 employees. People who have little to no expendable income actually spend it when they have more. They might need their truck fixed but have put it off for months. They might have a unpaid parking ticket that they put off for months. They might take their daughter out to ice cream because they can actually afford to do it. When a wealthy person brings in more income, he might put it in the stock market or simply save it, meaning more money is sitting in a bank and not being distributed in our economy. Of course you have different levels. And I understand why it might piss off the middle wage employee if all of a sudden the min starts making $15. But it's just out of pettiness and aren't you the guy advocating that it's a free market? That person making $18 can go find another job or he can just pout. (Not to mention that this phenomenon works in reverse. Corporations hiring people out of college for next to nothing then firing them the second they start making too much money and replace them with the out of college exploitable worker.) Employers hire workers according to a fuck ton of things. This isn't an econ class dude. Shitty workers can be employed for decades because the boss just likes them. Higher skilled workers can never climb the ladder because they don't play the political game. It doesn't work like a god damn text book.
You can put stipulations on minimum wage laws. It's not like it has to be just straight $15/hour like you're making it. You can make different requirements for different sized businesses. You can make different requirements for age. You can make different requirements for location. Etc. This is why it's so stupid when people say "simplify our tax codes." No, make that shit as complicated as possible to account for different situations. The ultimate goal is to make the game of capitalism as fair as possible so the cream of the crop has the opportunity to rise.
I would just like to point out with Antifa will not play well at the ballot box and just because Nazis are bad doesn't automatically make Antifa good.
you broke down the net profit of the ice cream shop based on future projections and profit margins of an ice cream cone ($3??), then scold me that this is not an econ class and it doesn't work like a book? eh. It's got nothing to do with pissing anyone off, it's the value the employer is getting for the wage. He can't reasonably pay the janitor a similar wage as a manager. Crying "what about the free market??" to a minimum wage law is a little disingenuous, right? Yea, the person making $18 an hour can go find another job, sure, I'm all for that. Go get paid what you think you are worth. But a min wage FORCES employers to value anyone below $15 an hour the same. Right now there are people making $8/hour and other people making $15/hr. In a perfect world, the people making $15 are more valuable workers; they are more skilled, more efficient, better at what they do, make bigger decisions, etc. as compared to the $8/hr worker. When you wave a magic wand and declare that all of those $8 workers now make $15, you are taking the least skilled, entry level people and making their cost to the employer equal to the $15/hr worker. Which is obviously not the actual case, that $8 worker did not all of the sudden acquire the skills that the $15 worker has, right?
I just glanced 'ice cream shop' and 'ice cream cone' and I'm glad I've skipped the rest of that conversation
eh...the tax thing is a silly argument. Those rich fat cats take advantage of every loophole and complication in the code to their benefit, in ways that poor people are unaware of and/or are unable to exploit. By the time you are done putting infinite stipulations on the min wage laws I'm not sure you are going to accomplish what you plan on accomplishing, or make anyone happy. It's a better idea than a straight min wage for the country tho.
"libertarians" are buying up all the Econ departments, but tmb "libertarians" are almost always compete economic neophytes.
I think Empire is on the reading list. If not it's worth reading. They have a new book. It has zero reviews on amazon, while a book about liberals being the Real Nazis is a best seller in the "politics and social science" section.
Childhood Friend Helps ATF Nab AR to IL Gunrunner Confidential informant grew up with Klint Kelley outside Chicago LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - We're learning more about a Malvern man who allegedly trafficked hundreds of guns to the streets of Chicago. 27 year old Klint Kelley was arrested Sunday outside Chicago during a multi-agency bust. Newly obtained documents show one of Kelley's childhood friends from Illinois served as a confidential informant for ATF agents. The informant, a felon, told investigators Kelley claimed to have been running guns from Arkansas to the Chicago area for years. Chicago Police said in a press conference Tuesday they believed Kelley was singlehandedly responsible for providing hundreds of illegal weapons that often wound up in the hands of gang members. In March 2017, the informant supposedly reached out to Kelley over interest in buying guns, opening the undercover operation that ended with Kelley's eventual arrest. In their communications, the informant alluded to intending to resell the weapons. Between March and September, court documents show Kelley drove three times from Arkansas to Chicago with a car load of guns to sell. 21 guns were sold to the informant alongside an undercover agent, mostly handguns and semi-automatic weapons, totaling nearly $15,000. Those documents also show that Kelley brought his girlfriend from Arkansas along for the two of the gunrunning trips. Her name is never mentioned and officials have not indicated whether she could face charges as well. Back in Malvern, the news of Kelley's arrest doesn't seem to have made its way around town. Noah Wiley, a lifelong Malvern resident, says he hadn't heard about the case but was genuinely shocked to hear someone in his small hometown would be accused of carrying out such a scheme. "It's really appalling, to be honest," Wiley said. "To hear something like that came from our town, because weapons are a big issue." Kelley is charged with selling firearms to a known felon and multiple counts of dealing firearms across state lines without a license. He is currently in the custody of US Marshals and due back in federal court in Chicago Thursday.
Long-Secret Report Shows How Utility Knew 18 Months in Advance of Multibillion-Dollar Nuclear Plant ‘Fiasco’ It Wanted Customers to Pay For FacebookTwitterGoogle+Share (Columbia, S.C.) State: S.C. lawmakers Tuesday urged state regulators to block SCE&G from charging its customers any more for the failed V.C. Summer nuclear project, a day after the release of a report that diagnosed critical problems at the construction site about 18 months before its abandonment. That report, completed by Bechtel Corp. in February 2016, shows SCE&G and the state-owned Santee Cooper utility were warned the Fairfield County venture suffered a host of problems, including flawed construction plans, faulty designs and inadequate management of contractors. Lawmakers who read the lengthy report Tuesday say it confirmed that SCE&G – and not its ratepayers – should shoulder any future costs. Kirkman Finlay, R-Richland, who is on a S.C. House committee investigating the nuclear fiasco. Finlay and others say the S.C. Public Service Commission, the state board that has OK’d nine SCE&G rate hikes since 2008 for the nuclear project, should reject any further V.C. Summer-related rate-hike requests from the utility. SCE&G customers already have paid $1.7 billion toward the failed project. In August, the Cayce-based utility filed – then withdrew – a request to charge customers at least another $2.2 billion to shutter the project. However, the Bechtel report could undermine any efforts by SCE&G to recoup those costs. More: Long-secret report could save SCE&G’s customers billions
What, you saw another poster try to connect 2 unrelated things and said - no, you are doing it wrong, watch this!!! Yes, I'd like to know what happens if a 13 year old consents to having sex with an adult. Is that ok, does it make it consensual, does it make it ok??? That's what I'm asking. That's exactly what I'm asking. Seriously, awesome job getting to the crux of the issue here, fucking amazing work Columbo. I didn't think anyone would see where I was going with all of this, but you fucking nailed it.
By the standards of nearly any other poster on this board, that post would be both deranged and long winded.
the people who cape up for capitalism despite not seeing the benefits of it are my fucking favorite see: "ughhhh muuhhhh supply and demand" hardos in the hurricane thread
at least ian is blaming communism instead of socialism people complaint about us turning into a socialist country really have a lot of inner reconciliation to do with living in a country founded on those principles
Ian is another member of the strange phenomenon that has taken over members of our generation in American conservatism. They come to it through weird online reactionary movements (in his case gamergate), then spot weld on fiscal conservatism after the fact. You can see some of the more online Charlottesville guys doing the same shit right now. No one likes conservatism on its economic merits anymore, from recruitment to retention, it's 100% aggrievement.
A stunning new study shows that Fox News is more powerful than we ever imagined It could even be flipping elections. Updated by Dylan Matthews@dylanmatt tweet Spoiler share Fair and balanced. Fox News Fox News is, by far, America’s dominant TV news channel; in the second quarter of 2017, Fox posted 2.35 million total viewers in primetime versus 1.64 million for MSNBC and 1.06 million for CNN. Given that Fox was founded by a longtime Republican Party operative and has almost exclusively hired conservative commentators, talk radio hosts, and the like to host its shows, it would stand to reason that its dominance on basic cable could influence how Americans vote, perhaps even tipping elections. A new study in the American Economic Review (the discipline’s flagship journal), with an intriguing and persuasive methodology, finds exactly that. Emory University political scientist Gregory Martin and Stanford economist Ali Yurukoglu estimate that watching Fox News directly causes a substantial rightward shift in viewers’ attitudes, which translates into a significantly greater willingness to vote for Republican candidates. They estimate that if Fox News hadn't existed, the Republican presidential candidate’s share of the two-party vote would have been 3.59 points lower in 2004 and 6.34 points lower in 2008. For context, that would've made John Kerry the 2004 popular vote winner, and turned Barack Obama's 2008 victory into a landslide where he got 60 percent of the two-party vote. "There is a non-trivial amount of uncertainty" about those estimates, Yurukoglu cautions. "I personally don't think it's totally implausible, but it is higher than I would have guessed prior to the research." And even if the effect were half as large as estimated, that’d still mean that Fox News is having a very real, sizable effect on elections. How Fox News transformed America Martin and Yurukoglu integrated a vast array of data — on Fox's channel position and viewership, individual/zip code/county level presidential voting behavior, and transcripts of cable news shows to showcase their ideology — into an extensive model that they can then use to estimate how effective Fox (and CNN and MSNBC) is at persuading viewers to vote its way. Below, for instance, is how the estimated ideological stance of each channel changed over time; a lower score means more liberal, and a higher score means more conservative. You can see Fox News growing more conservative and MSNBC starting its move to the left with Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, and others in the late 2000s: <img src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/9190941/Screenshot_2017_09_06_17.49.02.png" alt="Ideology by channel"> Martin and Yurukoglu 2017 The effects of CNN and MSNBC on centrist voters are mostly negligible; MSNBC, in 2000 and 2004, modestly increased odds of voting Republican, before it turned left in time for 2008. But Fox News increases Republican voting odds for centrists, for Democratic viewers, and even, in 2004 and 2008, for Republicans already strongly inclined to vote that way. Watching three minutes more of Fox News per week in 2008 would have made the typical Democratic or centrist voter 1 percentage point likelier to vote Republican that year. “Fox is substantially better at influencing Democrats than MSNBC is at influencing Republicans," the authors find. While most Fox viewers are Republican, a sizable minority aren't, and they're particularly suggestible to the channel's influence. In 2000, they estimate that 58 percent of Fox viewers who were initially Democrats changed to supporting the Republican candidate by the end of the election cycle; in 2004, the persuasion rate was 27 percent, and 28 percent in 2008. MSNBC, by contrast, only persuaded 8 percent of initial Republicans to vote Democratic in the 2008 cycle. These are big effects, with major societal implications. The authors find that the Fox News effect translates into a 0.46 percentage point boost to the GOP vote share in the 2000 presidential race, a 3.59-point boost in 2004, and a 6.34-point boost in 2008; the boost increases as the channel's viewership grew. This effect alone is large enough, they argue, to explain all the polarization in the US public's political views from 2000 to 2008. What's more, they find that Fox isn't setting its ideology where it ought to to maximize its viewership. It's much more conservative than is optimal from that perspective. But it's pretty close to the slant that would maximize its persuasive power: that would result in the largest rightward movement among viewers. CNN, by contrast, matched its political stances pretty closely to the viewer-maximizing point, showing less interest in operating as a political agent. This is a “partial equilibrium” estimate: The estimates of Fox News’s effect are relative to a counterfactual where it disappears and only CNN and MSNBC remain. The authors are implicitly assuming another similarly conservative channel wouldn’t have emerged. “As a result, many (not most, but a substantial number) of former FNC viewers substitute into a relatively much less conservative option,” Martin explains. “In reality, you might imagine that a new conservative channel might have entered to replace FNC, or MSNBC or CNN might have moved right to capture the former FNC audience had FNC exited for some reason.” But the result also jibes with existing research on the importance of Fox News. Studies looking at the initial rollout of Fox News in the 1990s found similar effects: There was increased support for GOP positions on controversial issues in places where Fox News was introduced, and increased GOP vote share too. "Our estimates imply that Fox News convinced 3 to 28 percent of its viewers to vote Republican, depending on the audience measure," economists Stefano DellaVigna (Berkeley) and Ethan Kaplan (Maryland) found in a seminal 2007 paper. But, as political scientist Matt Grossmann (Michigan State) and David Hopkins (Boston College) have noted, these studies likely underestimated the effects of Fox, because they only looked at the 1996 to 2000 rollout of the channel, when it was much less watched. It would stand to reason that these effects would grow as the channel became more popular and more conservative. That’s what makes the latest study so important. It builds on the prior research, confirms it, and shows how Fox’s increased popularity over the 2000s amplified its effects. How the study works <img src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/9198207/22704iBEBCB7021B6FDEF3.jpeg" alt="A cable menu"> Cable menus, saving us once again Comcast XFINITY The coolest thing about this research is the methodology. It’s really hard to estimate the effects of media outlets on individuals’ behavior, as media consumption is a two-way street. Yes, media can change peoples’ opinions and behavior, but people also choose to consume particular media because it aligns with their opinions and affirms stuff they’re doing already. And prior economic research on media bias has found that media outlets’ political stances are demand-driven: that is, they take the positions they do because they want to gain readers/listeners/viewers. In this interpretation, Fox News might just be producing segments depicting food stamp recipients as lazy lobster-eating surfers because their audience already hates food stamps and welfare programs and wants something with which to agree. Confirmation bias is a hell of a drug. So figuring out that a given media outlet is changing viewers’ minds, rather than merely reflecting their viewpoints back to them, is tricky. But Martin and Yurukoglu figured out an ingenious way around that problem: channel ordering. It turns out that more people watch Fox News when it has a lower channel number. Fox News’s average channel number is around 38 to 41 (depending on which of Martin and Yurukoglu’s samples you're looking at) and lowering the channel number to 19 to 23 or thereabouts causes viewers to watch 2.5 more minutes per week of Fox News, on average. In practice, that could translate into no effect on most people and a bigger effect (like, an hour more viewing per week) among a minority of cable subscribers — 2.5 minutes is just the overall figure. What’s more, it doesn't appear that cable or satellite TV providers make channel position decisions based on local politics; they don't lower Fox News' channel number in conservative towns or countries or raise it in liberal cities. So people in areas where Fox News has a low channel number watch more of the channel for reasons that are basically random, and unrelated to the viewer’s personal politics. That makes channel positioning a bit like a randomized experiment: Some people are randomly provoked to watch more Fox News than others, enabling researchers to see what effect watching Fox had on them. Especially combined with the prior, also rigorous research looking at Fox’s initial rollout, Martin and Yurukoglu’s paper provides powerful evidence that Fox News is a critically important actor in American politics. It’s doing more than serving a market need; it’s actively reshaping American public opinion.
warning warning warning DK post Oregon's governor says the Trump administration refused request for help combating wildfires Spoiler By Jen Hayden Thursday Sep 07, 2017 · 10:38 AM CDT 2017/09/07 · 10:38 Hero firefighters combat wildfires in the western United States. An estimated 8,000 people are battling a series of 24 raging fires in Oregon, most notably Chetco Bar Fire, which has engulfed nearly 180,000 acres, and the Eagle Creek wildfire which is threatening the eastern edge of Portland. The Eagle Creek fire has burned 33,000 acres and while Oregon firefighters are starting to make some headway, containing about 5 percent of the fire through burnouts conducted on Wednesday, more resources are needed throughout the state. Oregon Public Broadcasting reports that Governor Kate Brown previously asked the Trump administration for help and they flatly refused any assistance: But if there is wildfire management to second-guess, Oregon’s Democratic governor would direct it at the Trump Administration and its response to a request she made last month. “I talked with the federal authorities two weeks ago, asking for additional federal assistance, I was told point-blank ‘no’,” said Brown. The U.S. Forest Service has been helping, and Oregon is expecting the arrival of 200 active duty military from Joint Base Lewis-McCord in Washington. But Gov. Brown argued federal officials should be directing more resources to Oregon, because of the disproportionate degree of fire danger in the state. Brown’s numbers and those from the National Interagency Fire Center tell a similar story: that Oregon accounts for nearly one-third of the scorched acres in the country. Of 1.5 million acres or more burning across the country about a half million acres are in Oregon. Sadly, the Eagle Creek fire was reportedly started by a teenager throwing fireworks in Eagle Creek Canyon: “I saw this kid throw a smoke bomb — just lobbed it and dropped it down into the woods. … I saw him throw something that was on fire. Then we all looked over the edge and saw smoke,” she said. “I said, ‘Do you realize how dangerous this is?’” Law enforcement caught up with the suspect before he left the area: One suspect has been identified as a 15-year-old male from Vancouver, Washington. Oregon State Police spokesman Bill Fugate said if charged, the suspect could face the same state charges as an adult. Fugate said OSP will release the suspect’s name if and when charges are filed. It is believed he and others may have been using fireworks which started the forest fire along the Eagle Creek Trail.